Daylight breaking

Sunday

Sep 25, 2011 at 12:01 AM

STOCKTON - For nearly a year, Aaron Delgado, now 21, spent most of his days reclined on a couch in a corner of the Family and Youth Services drop-in center on California Street. Occasionally he picked up his guitar, but mostly he slept or tried to sleep, struggling to cope with newly diagnosed bone cancer and the debilitating side effects of its treatment.

Jennifer Torres

STOCKTON - For nearly a year, Aaron Delgado, now 21, spent most of his days reclined on a couch in a corner of the Family and Youth Services drop-in center on California Street. Occasionally he picked up his guitar, but mostly he slept or tried to sleep, struggling to cope with newly diagnosed bone cancer and the debilitating side effects of its treatment.

And during those months, Jezelle Reyes, his 19-year-old girlfriend, rarely left his side for more than a few minutes. Delgado's sickness, she said, had frozen both of their lives.

But recently, one week before his next-to-last chemotherapy session, Delgado was sitting up, muttering at a handheld video game.

Reyes was within earshot, but Delgado wasn't the focus of her attention.

She was busy painting animals from the Chinese zodiac and contemplating a move out of the youth shelter and into their own apartment.

As Delgado's treatment for osteosarcoma winds down, both he and Reyes are optimistic about his recovery and are trying to settle into lives in which cancer is not at the center of their thoughts.

"My hair is going to fall out one more time, and then I can start growing it back," said Delgado, a heavy metal guitarist. "It'll be long like before. I'll trim it only every now and then."

Delgado spent months in San Francisco earlier this year, receiving chemotherapy, and in April, undergoing surgery to remove the cancerous tumor in his leg. It was a low point, he said. He worried, quietly but constantly, that doctors would decide to amputate.

They didn't.

"I had a sense of relief," he said. "I woke up and thought, 'OK. I'm still alive.' "

Delgado continues to use a walker and, for long distances, a wheelchair, but his leg is healing.

"It doesn't feel so stiff anymore," he said. "My physical therapist noticed an increase in how much I can bend my knee. She said it was significant. Adequate enough to walk."

After his chemotherapy is finished, Delgado said he will try to earn his high school diploma - he dropped out several credits shy of graduating. Then he wants to go to college. He is interested in Red Rocks Community College, located near Denver.

"They build guitars there," he said.

Reyes said she would like to earn her GED but isn't sure what she wants to study after that.

Counselors at Family and Youth Services were worried about how she would cope when Delgado no longer needed her to be his constant caretaker. So much of her identity had become wrapped up in nursing him, they said. What would she do when he was healthy again?

Soon after the couple returned to Stockton from San Francisco, Reyes got a job with the Manteca-based Michelle's Golden Brown Breads, helping deliver and sell baked goods at farmers markets throughout the region.

She gave the job up after a few months. Lifting bakery trays was aggravating cysts in her wrists, she said.

Now Reyes is volunteering for Family and Youth Services, going out with a team that tries to identify homeless or troubled teens and direct them to help.

"I like the fact that we're helping a lot of kids out there," she said.

Reyes left home because, she said, she couldn't live with her stepfather. Since Delgado became ill, though, her relationship with her mother has grown stronger.

"We talked more," she said. "I went to her more for help."

Delgado, too, has started to rebuild a fractured relationship with his parents. He declined to contact his mother for months, even at the height of his illness. She had no idea until well after he was hospitalized that he was even sick.